The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is to integrate over 160 computing centers
across 40 countries around the world.
IAS Junior Fellow, Dr Kirill Prokofiev is now at CERN for the ATLAS experiment. Please read on to P.8-9 "IAS Junior Fellow Sets Sail for CERN ATLAS" to find out more.
In the 1980s, CERN developed a communication system
to handle the vast amount of data to be analyzed by the
physicists world-wide. This information system, the World
Wide Web (www), was released in the early 1990s for the
world to use for free. To face the present challenges, the
LHC has created the world’s largest computing grid,
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), which integrates
thousands of computers and storage systems in over 13
Tier-1 and 150 Tier-2 computing centers across 40
countries around the world. Every day WLCG processes
more than a million jobs, a number that will increase in
coming years.
The Joint Consortium for Fundamental Physics comprising
representatives of HKUST, HKU and CUHK was formed in
2013. Under this umbrella, a Hong Kong cluster formally
joined the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in June 2014.
One of the missions led by the Hong Kong cluster is to
build up a Tier-2 computing center in Hong Kong, which
is expected to play an important role in serving both the
LHC physics community and the local scientific and
engineering communities. This center is designed to have
1,000 processing cores and 1 petabytes of disk space. It
will start to function in early 2016.
Looking beyond LHC, building the next-generation
collider in China is being proposed this year. Led by the
Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences (CAS), the HKUST team participated
in the preliminary conceptual design of the “Circular
Electron-Positron Collider
–
Super Proton-Proton Collider”.
In January 2015, IAS hosted a program on the Future of
High Energy Physics together with IHEP. This IAS program
provided a lively platform for about 100 participants from
institutions in US, Europe and Asia.
May 2015
Knowledge Corner
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